With continuous development of technologies, construction of a data center (Data Center, DC) faces various severe challenges. How to improve a DC resource utilization rate and how to reduce DC energy consumption and costs become problems of concern.
Virtualization provides a direction for construction and development of a new generation data center. A virtualization technology helps the data center integrate hardware resources, establish a virtual resource pool, implement global resource sharing, perform distribution according to service requirements, so as to improve a comprehensive utilization rate of a system resource and reduce energy consumption of a device.
Data center virtualization requires network virtualization. A conventional network mode exposes many disadvantages in a data center virtualization network. A concept of decoupling a control plane of a network device from a data plane of the network device in SDN coincides with a virtualization network.
In SDN, the OpenFlow protocol may be used to decouple a control plane of a network device from a data plane of the network device to implement flexible control of network traffic. With evolution of a series of versions, the OpenFlow protocol is gradually standardized, tends to become mature, and forms a standard. The OpenFlow protocol supports a function of querying a flow entry according to any combination of fields, and proposes a concept of a multi-level flow entry. A size of a flow entry and a quantity of flow entries become a bottleneck that urgently needs to be broken through for an existing chip to support the OpenFlow protocol.
Each time end-to-end communication is implemented in the SDN, an SDN control device delivers a flow entry to each involved switching device. With an increase of switching devices at lower layers, flow entries of a switching device in a backbone network continuously multiply. A large number of flow entries occupy resources of a control device in the SDN and the switching device in the backbone network in the SDN, and affect performance of devices in the SDN.